Echo
Portrayed by Eliza Dushku, Echo is the main character of Dollhouse. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with identities, personalities, skills, and memories in order to be sent into the world on engagements. Between engagements they live in the Dollhouse with no memory of their pasts or knowledge of their futures. In this child-like state Echo begins to become self-aware and to search for answers about who she is. Character Development Background Before Echo was recruited as a Doll, her name was Caroline Farrell. A file held by Adelle DeWitt suggests that Caroline's past was "a mess." It is promised that this will be taken care of if she submits to a five-year tenure at the Dollhouse. Caroline expresses her intent to "make a difference" and refers to a professor who helped her decide to "stand up for something," a woman revealed to be Professor Janack in "Echoes." They allude to the consequences of something Caroline has done or failed to do in an attempt to make a difference, which appears to be the mess Adelle is using to pressure Caroline into signing on as a doll. In "Echoes", Echo's life as Caroline is revealed. She was a student at Freemont College, where she tried to stop animal experimentation in the Rossum Corporation laboratories. After hatching a plan to break in underground to videotape the animal exploitation, Caroline and her boyfriend, Leo, found much more than animals in the Rossum building -- they found ongoing experiments involving the human brain, human subjects (seemingly both willing and unwilling), and even human fetuses. After they were caught by security, Leo and Caroline tried to escape with their new video footage, and thus Leo was killed when the guards opened fire. This led to DeWitt finding Caroline and offering her a position as an Active. In "Needs", an experiment is launched within the Dollhouse to try to help the "glitching" Actives find closure, which was predicted to help them accept their new lives. Thus, Echo awoke as Caroline, only without many of her memories. When offered the chance to escape with her fellow Actives Victor, Sierra and November, Caroline chooses to return to the Dollhouse to save everyone inside it, again displaying a strong, caring, and compassionate nature that leads her to try to save everyone around her. Adelle comments that Caroline was "never very realistic." Caroline manages to force Adelle and Topher Brink at gunpoint to lead every Active out into the sunlight before being knocked unconscious by drugs set to release once she'd found closure, indicating that Caroline would never be at rest until she had saved them all. In "Omega", we see Caroline's first viewing of the Dollhouse, in which she describes as being like "walking to the gallows" and describes the Actives around her as "zombies." Later, in Echo's earliest days, she is kissed by the Active Alpha, who is infatuated with her; his handler tries to discourage this behavior, which ought not to be possible for Dolls. Then, when Alpha overhears the handler Sophie Alvarez describe Whiskey as the "number one" Active, he slashes Whiskey's face with pruning shears so that Echo can claim the number one space. In the ensuing massacre after the composite event in which Alpha has 48 personalities downloaded into his brain, he spares Echo's life before his escape. Season One In the series premiere "Ghost," Echo faces two engagements: one as a dream date, and one as an expert hostage negotiator. She finds herself in danger when a psychopathic client decides to hunt her down in "The Target" to see if she deserves the right to live. Echo is regarded as one of "the best" Actives in the Dollhouse's possession, and is very popular with clients. However, Echo, like Alpha before her, is a very peculiar Doll in that she is able to work outside the parameters or her programming, to defy imprinting, and to carry residual memories from her imprinted state when inactive. While drugged with psychedelic drugs in "The Target," Echo, in the personality of Jenny, begins to see apparitions of past personalities - including the original Caroline - despite the fact that these personalities are supposed to have been "wiped" clean. From the encounter with Richard Connell in the same episode, she learns his mantra "shoulder to the wheel" and its accompanying gesture, slapping one's shoulder; in her inactive state, she echos his gesture. Despite being imprinted with a permanent trust in and dependence on Boyd, when he asks her "Do you trust me?", she turns it around on him and asserts herself, asking the same of him. In the next episode, "Stage Fright," Echo and new Active Sierra begin to develop a friendship in the confines of the Dollhouse, and there are signs of this when they encounter one another as their imprinted personalities, Jordan and Audra. When Jordan encounters Boyd, as well as Sierra's handler, Joe Hearn, she quickly voices her dislike and distrust of him; as Echo and Sierra once again, Echo shakes her head at Sierra to not speak to her in the presence of Sierra's handler, due to that residual distrust. Boyd and Dr. Claire Saunders discuss Echo's unique brilliance, having found a more effective and radical means of fulfilling her mission outside the confines of her imprint, and worry that being too good might not be a good thing for her. Echo's friendship has now extended to Victor and the three dolls have been observed to eat together regularly, a event that Topher dismisses as instinctual herding patterns. Her new friends were put in danger in "Man on the street" when Victor was accused of raping Sierra. It was ultimately proven by Boyd and possibly Echo as well (who had noted that Sierra was crying a lot before going to sleep) that the true culprit was Sierra's handler. In this episode, she also displayed compassion and concern for her friends when she provided information to the Dollhouse staff on Sierra's situation, and listened to Victor when he was confused by the Dollhouse staff's motivation behind questioning him. She even asked frequently where Victor had been taken during Boyd's plan, showing concern for his safety. Also in this episode, she was sent to frame Paul for shooting a police officer, but due to an unknown person secretly grafting information onto her imprint, she told him the Dollhouse was real (and there is more than one) and told him to find the truth of its purpose. After an incident in "Echoes", where Echo as Alice went off-mission to the scene of Caroline's original capture, the Dollhouse's Dr. Saunders devised a plan to give the Actives a sense of closure about their past lives and hopefully prevent future glitching. In "Needs", Echo along with Victor, Sierra, November and Mike woke up in their original personalities but without their original memories and were allowed by the Dollhouse to attempt a jailbreak so that they could find their closure in the real world. Caroline however, chose to re-enter the Dollhouse and forced Adelle at gunpoint to release the Actives, before passing out and being returned to her Echo personality once closure was reached. However, in the next episode, "A Spy in the House of Love", they discover that Echo still seems to want to save everyone. Echo insists (to Topher's shock) that he imprints her with a detective spy-hunter personality so that she can uncover the mole within the Dollhouse, and due to this deduction, she is later able to conclude that Dominic is the NSA mole within the Dollhouse. While in-persona as the spy hunter, she remembers Dominic's previous attempt on her life and asserts confidently to him that she is "not broken". DeWitt is amazed by Echo's capacity for deductive reasoning and rather than let Topher scrub her again, she decides to let Echo continue evolving as she believes Echo will again save the Dollhouse. By contrast, Dominic forewarns that Echo will one day bring the place down. In "Briar Rose", Echo is sleeping when Paul infiltrates the Dollhouse, helped by Alpha, pretending to be Stephen Kepler (an environmental systems designer whom Alpha in fact has just slain). Paul wakes her up in the pod room, but is stopped by Boyd. Paul and Boyd fight while Paul tries to drag Echo out of the Dollhouse. During the fight, Echo accesses her previous imprints and uses her fighting skills to push Paul off the stairs. With Paul captured, Alpha takes Echo to the imprinting room where he imprints her with the personality of Crystal, the girlfriend to his Bobby personality who is easily manipulated and who, partly, he is fond of. After the imprint, they kiss passionately, and she calls Alpha "my prince." They leave the Dollhouse together. In "Omega", Alpha/Bobby and Echo/Crystal are beginning to relive their glory days and have begun a crime spree again, but Alpha's other personalities have more pressing concerns. They have kidnapped a girl called Wendy as part of a scheme to force Echo to evolve much as Alpha has done. Alpha places the Caroline personality into Wendy so that he can confront her about her abandonment of Echo; the personality disowned the soul as much as the mind did the body. Alpha forces Echo/Crystal into a chair where her 38 previous personalities are downloaded into her at once in a composite event with hopes she can kill Wendy/Caroline and become just like Alpha, like a god or an Übermensch. However, given Caroline/Echo being intrinsically good unlike Alpha's original – and naturally evil – personality of Carl William Craft, she awakens with perfect sanity and defends Caroline/Wendy against Alpha and vows to reunite them in one body. Echo fights Alpha and they are evenly matched. Echo experiences full awareness of herself as "Echo" but also as something of Caroline and comes to fully understand all the memories of her experiences as a blank state in the Dollhouse. Alpha shoots Wendy dead and vows to destroy the saved Caroline personality on the wedge but instead uses it as an aid to bid his getaway, shooting Echo in the shoulder and escaping. After this event, Boyd finds Echo and returns her to the Dollhouse where her wound will be tended to and after her wipe it appears at first she has returned to being the same placid if strangely observant Echo, until later when going to sleep in her pod she whispers the word "Caroline" to herself. Season Two Season two of Dollhouse begins some months after Alpha's escape and Echo's rescue at the end of "Omega." According to Topher, Echo has been completely wiped of all of her personalities and is, in theory, once more a blank slate. However, it is revealed that Echo's unique talent at activating beyond her mission parameters is now being expanded by the remnants of the personalities that Topher can't seem to wipe clean from her. As shown in an "Epitaph One" flashback set shortly after "Omega," the Echo consciousness is now fully self-aware and is pretending to be in a blank state to avoid detection. Using the skills and memories of the extra personalities "added" to her, she is working with Paul Ballard to bring down the Dollhouse and discover more about Caroline. In the season premiere "Vows," Echo is hired by Paul, who now has a reluctant partnership with the Dollhouse, for a long-term engagement in which she is Paul's FBI partner who apparently seduces a major arms dealer, Martin Klar (an old and elusive enemy of Ballard) into marrying her. After she is caught searching his files, Martin slams her head down on his desk, which apparently releases some sort of block within her; she tries to stay on her engagement and convince him of her innocence but is foiled by mistakenly calling herself "Mrs. Eleanor Penn" -- the name of the hostage negotiator personality she donned in the season one episode "Ghost." Martin then tries to flee the country with Echo, but Paul steps in at the airport to save her by deliberately confusing her and assaulting her, correctly guessing that Echo is remembering her other personalities. After goading her into remembering the assassin imprint she was given to fight Ballard with in the episode "Man on the Street," Echo quickly subdues Martin's guards and collars her "husband" before he can flee. At the end of the episode, Paul confronts her about her memories and Echo surprises him by revealing that she fully remembers what was done to her and at times can feel each of the personalities within her. "But they aren't the one," she says. Paul asks her if she is talking about Caroline, and Echo agrees that she wishes to find her -- but not only Caroline. Echo indicates that she'd like to find the original personalities of all of the Actives within the Dollhouse and free them. Paul agrees to help her and indeed agrees to become Echo's handler. This trend continues at the end of the second episode "Instinct," when Ballard asks Echo if she would like him to inform Topher that she is no longer truly responding to the personality wipes. Echo responds firmly that "feeling sad is better than feeling nothing," indicating that while she is not a complete person, she is still very much an individual – becoming both self-aware and motivated to find who she truly is and to stop what is going on around her. This contrasts Echo's resolve with that of Caroline, who agreed to make it all go away, or of Madeline Costley (the former November) who chose to not feel anything rather than relive the pain of her daughter's death; the episode structurally presupposes these comparisons. At the end of "Belle Chose," Echo again displays a recall of her imprints when she looks at the man whose personality she temporarily (and accidentally) acquired and says, "Goodness gracious," which was his particular catchphrase. The fact that the man had the personality of a sociopath and would likely devolve into a serial killer is a troublesome indicator of the negative impacts Echo may feel from the remnants of the personalities within her, though whether this will re-emerge is yet to be known. In "Belonging", both Victor and Echo notice that Sierra has been painting pictures of a dark shape she describes as "the bad man." Echo takes the picture to Topher, trying to tell him Sierra is deeply troubled. Later, Echo comes across Victor, who is frantically picking up every bottle of black paint he can find, determined to get rid of the stuff because he believes it is upsetting Sierra. Agreeing they need to help Sierra, Echo helps him while congratulating him in her own way for helping Sierra and showing a developing sentience, though Victor at this point doesn't understand her thanks. At the same time Echo is confronted by Boyd, who has discovered that Echo is evolving (reading and writing, remembering things and even learning how to lie). Bits and pieces of Echo's written down recollections of her previous identities and information about the dollhouse shortly appear in the same episode when her sleeping pod's blind closes (23"). Among these are: "The attic is bad"; "Where is Caroline"; "My son killed me" ("Haunted"); "I was blind" ("True Believer"); "Shoulder to the wheel" ("The Target") etc. . While promising to keep her self-awareness a secret, he warns Echo to be careful because others may not be so sympathetic. Echo simply responds she can feel something bad on the way anyway and she wants everyone awake and able to withstand it when it comes. At the end of the episode Echo helps her friends, who are having a secret rendezvous in the sleeping pods, by acting has their lookout – reading a book nearby to make sure Victor and Sierra are not discovered sleeping together in one pod. She also gains an ally in Boyd, who realizes after Sierra's killing of Nolan Kinnard that something bad may one day come and smuggles her an all-access key card for when the dark day finally comes. In "The Public Eye", Echo demonstrates a growing intuitiveness, able to tell by looking at Cindy Perrin that "she isn't right". Echo is sent to stop Senator Daniel Perrin before he can expose the Dollhouse's secrets. The Dollhouse programs Echo as an escort named Bree. After slipping a sleeping drug into Senator Perrin's drink, Bree has her way with him and videotapes it. When the Senator wakes he works out that she is an Active sent by the Dollhouse. He brings her to his safehouse where Madeline Costley (formerly November) is staying for protection. Before entering the building, Echo and Daniel feel the effect of Ballard's disruptor, thus proving that she and Daniel alike are both Actives; Daniel is under the control of Rossum, who are using him to exonerate the organisation and install an Active within parliament. Echo drives off with Daniel, but he causes the car to crash and tries to escape. Echo catches up to him shortly before his wife does; Echo concludes that Cindy Perrin is in fact Daniel's handler. Cindy and Echo fight and Echo is hit in the head, triggering another persona which knocks Cindy unconscious. Echo is then captured by the D.C. Dollhouse, where she is violently wiped and imprinted with Bennett Halverson's last memory of Caroline Farrell, wherein Caroline leaves Bennett to die, costing her the use of her arm ( ). Bennett allows Echo to escape, but stages it as a breakout; Echo is left with Bennett's dead left arm, caused by Caroline. The two remove their GPS tracking strips. Bennett and Topher attempt to remote wipe Echo and Daniel, but Bennett causes Daniel to turn into a killer, who kills Cindy and attempts to kill Echo. Echo overcomes her Bennett Halverson left-arm programming and fights back. While Daniel is reclaimed by his Dollhouse and able to exonerate Rossum as planned, Echo is left out on the street without a means of detection. In , three months go by and the LA Dollhouse does not recapture Echo, coming under the control of Matthew Harding. However, Paul Ballard finds Echo early on and helps her develop a full-self awareness: she can now access personas and skills at will, and has fallen in love with Paul (who does not have sex with her). She attributes her new growing self-awareness to Bennett's negative memory of Caroline: she now sees herself as Echo, and not just a shell waiting for Caroline. They plan a jailbreak for Mexican prisoner Galena, whom Echo accidentally got arrested, as a practice run for the Dollhouse itself. Using the medical skills of Rebecca Mynor, the master-thief skills of Taffy, as well as various sets of fighting and deductive skills, the two are eventually successfully at securing Galena's release. On returning to the Dollhouse, Echo finds it a much harsher place, and DeWitt confines her to solitary. In , Boyd and Topher are let in on Echo's secret and agree to keep it. Alpha breaks into the Dollhouse to see what about Paul makes Echo love him, and in the process wipes Paul braindead before imprinting himself with Paul. DeWitt discovers Echo's new full personhood and chooses to do nothing about it for the time being. When Victor is restored to Anthony Ceccoli and released per his contract in , only to be recaptured by a Rossum paramilitary supersoldier group, Echo is sent by Boyd and Topher along with Priya Tsetsang to reclaim him. When Echo is entered into the supersoldier hive mind, she is able to overpower it with her 40+ minds working in sychronicity. On ordering Anthony and Priya (Victor and Sierra) escape together, the three are wiped and DeWitt orders them to be condemned to the Attic. In , the three Actives are locked in a never-ending nightmare loop. With help from Attic-bound former-Head of Security Laurence Dominic, they are able to discover the weakness in Rossum's supercomputer mainframe (that it is a fallible matrix of human minds, the Attic itself) from Rossum Corp. founder Clyde Randolph. The three escape, and return to the Dollhouse, where DeWitt reveals to the other staff and to Priya and Tony that she sent Echo to the Attic to claim that information and gain an advantage over Rossum. Paul is saved by Topher and Ivy, who have had to remove one aspect of his personality and grant him Active architecture (make him a Doll) in order to imprint him as himself. The full team unite in Adelle's office against Rossum, and Echo declares it time for her to "meet" Caroline and step up the LA Dollhouse's rebel effort. The Possible Future ("Epitaph One") In the possible post-apocalyptic future shown in "Epitaph One" displaying what the world would be like should the technology of the Dollhouse ever be abused, Echo has been permanently restored to her Caroline identity and Caroline now works as a freedom fighter. In addition, the Caroline personality is also in operation in at least one other body than Caroline's own. The details of Echo's restoration are not made clear, nor is the exact nature of her relationship with Paul Ballard. When asked if they are still "together," Caroline shrugs and replies,"Jury's out on 'together.' He's got my back, though." Caroline is seen as something of a symbol of freedom to the characters of that future, and they spend the majority of the episode trying to find the stored copy of her personality so that she can lead them to "safe haven." Engagements Since joining the L.A. Dollhouse, Echo has been imprinted with at least 36 different personalities, and during a three month period had been imprinted with a personality at least five times. ( ; ) Little is known about the details of Echo's other engagements, but a majority are presumably of a romantic nature; she comments that at least seven of these personalities are in fact gay. ( ) Notes & References Category:Characters Category:Main characters Category:Actives